Perl was designed for practical use and therefore focuses on quick and easy programmability, completeness and adaptability . This philosophy is reflected in the following key words or phrases, mostly caused by Larry Wall. In contrast to languages such as Python, Perl is less prescriptive and provides intentionally for every problem several formulation and solution options.
For example, you can use logical operators than | | and && ( as in C ), or (with shades of meaning) and (like in Pascal) write, but also numerous commands with an overlapping of functions such as map and for allowing different formulations for the same set of facts as shown in ITIL Exam.
Some commands, such as the diamond operator () offer shortened spellings for existing functionality (in this case would be, with slight differences , equivalent would be what to write much longer).
This diversity is also visible in the CPAN and ITIL Exam, where often several modules fulfill a very similar purpose or one that also (albeit more complicated) could be implemented manually ( eg Getopt :: Long).
Another buzzword that can be seen as an extension of TIMTOWTDI , Perl called the first postmodern programming language. This means that Perl combines different paradigms and the user is free to combine structured , object-oriented , functional and imperative language features.
Simplicity
The other important mnemonic is Perl makes easy jobs easy and hard jobs possible, which means Perl keeps the simple tasks easy and the difficult tasks possible. This includes for the first goal to simplify common tasks as possible with short final solutions. For example, checked -e filename the existence of a file as shown in ITIL exam.
Easy to leave Simple tasks means for Perl but also possible to require no preparatory programming instructions , such as the filing of variables or writing a class. Second, Perl tries to be complete and provide to every problem at least the basics that make an ITIL exam solution possible.
The third objective is to not let the first two goals collide , wins with the growing language range of Perl 6 is becoming increasingly important , where based on the Huffman code, the notations of the most frequently used commands are kept as short as possible, without using the logic to break the notation similar commands.
Context Sensitive
In Perl , there are commands that have different meanings depending on the context in which they are used. Such a context-sensitive , data structures such as the array. Will there be assigned to another array, content is passed, the recipient is a single value ( scalar) , this will get the length of the array.